


but come ye back

by Red (S_Hylor)



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel 1872
Genre: 1872 (Marvel), Acceptance, Angst, Canonical Character Death, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Post-Canon, Sobriety, passive thoughts about dying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:55:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28094262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/S_Hylor/pseuds/Red
Summary: When the night is cold and the sky is open, Tony goes to talk to the past Sheriff of Timely.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 7
Kudos: 30
Collections: Captain America/Iron Man Bingo





	but come ye back

**Author's Note:**

> Writing this for my Cap/Iron Man Bingo square: "canon: 1872"
> 
> Unbeta'd, so please excuse any mistakes. 
> 
> Title taken from the song O Danny Boy, which is the song that Tony would sing to annoy Steve in the comics.

The air is crisp with the mid winter chill, and away from the sparse lighting thrown by the lamps of Timely, the stars stretch across the night sky endlessly above Tony. His breath clouds in front of him on each exhale and stings his throat and sets his teeth aching each inhale, but he doesn’t turn back towards the warmth of his smithy. 

The night is still and open, and in the distance he can hear the cries of coyotes, and imagines them stalking around the mountains and canyons. Places he used to ride out to with the Sheriff, when they’d had time for it. 

He pulls his jacket tighter around his shoulders, and nuzzles his face down into the scarf wrapped around his neck. Months had passed since the original owner had worn them, and Tony knows there is very little left of Steve’s scent on the clothing, but that doesn’t deter him from trying to find it. 

His foot kicks a rock in the gloom, and as many months ago he would have staggered and ended up sprawled on the ground, but sobriety has made him more sure footed. The need for a drink still nags at him some nights, especially the nights he wanders out of town to visit the grave marker they had erected in honour of Sheriff Rogers. 

A marker over an empty grave, but in the end it was the very least they could do for him. Something somewhere that people could visit and pay their respects. Though it was mostly only Tony who visits, so he half suspects that Natasha had organised the marker purely for him. 

It was fitting to have Steve’s memorial resting alongside his best friend. There’s still a blank space the other side of James that Tony knows Natasha has requested be her resting place eventually. They had been a family, in their own way. Then, no one had batted an eye in Timely, because it was a place that all sorts of detritus blew in and caught on the tired old buildings and somehow stayed. 

Extracting the glass tumbler from his jacket pocket, Tony sits down on the empty ground the other side of where Steve’s grave should be. He can’t help but wonder if, when he dies, someone will bury him here. Whether anyone in the town will know that that is what he wants. He knows that Timely wasn’t so blind they hadn’t seen the way he’d looked at Steve. It just wasn’t polite to talk about it, so no one did. 

Steve hadn’t been blind to it, Tony feels it in his bones that Steve had harboured feelings the same, what with the gentle way Steve would pick him up drunk and take him home. The reverence with which he’d helped Tony out of his jacket and boots so many nights before carefully putting him to bed. The air between them had always had the same crackle and heat as his forge, even if neither of them had had the nerve to act on it. Some nights he’d dreamt of Steve stroking his hair back from his forehead and kissing him there, whispering prayers that Tony’s demons would leave him alone. When mornings came uninterrupted, Tony had been less sure that it had been dream Steve who had done that. 

“Maybe that was just wishful thinking on my part,” he admits to the cold night air, feeling, that in some way, Steve can hear him. “That you’d lower your standards so much to love a sad old drunk like me.” 

A coyote cries off in the distance, and there’s the thin murmur of voices coming from Timely closer by. It’s the only response that Tony gets, not that he’d expected anything differently. 

“It’s probably for the best that it never happened,” Tony says after a long moment, feigning lightness in his voice. “You might have saved me, but I’m sure I would have destroyed you.” 

Thousands of stars above him twinkle in response. “But in the end, you didn’t need me to do that. This god forsaken town did that.”

It was unfair to blame the town, Tony knows, it had been Bullseye who had killed Steve, and Fisk who had dumped Steve’s body in the pig pen like he was nothing more than garbage. 

“You were a fool, Sheriff, to think good would triumph over bad. Your fool heart turned you into a dead fool, and I was the fool who loved you and never said.” 

Tony raises the glass and presses the cool surface to his lips, breathing deep the fresh, crips night air. He longs for a drink, wishes like he did every night that he hadn’t sworn off it. Being sober seemed like the best way to honour Steve’s memory, or perhaps he was just afraid to make a mess of himself now the good Sheriff was no longer alive to clean him up afterwards. He thinks that waking up slumped in an alleyway would ruin him in ways that not touching the drink ever again can’t. 

Setting the glass down he leans forward and rests his arms around his knees, looking at the undisturbed dirt beneath that name  _ Steve Rogers _ . “I promised myself I wasn’t going to give you grief this time, I’m sorry. I came with news though.” 

He reaches inside his jacket and pulls the news print from inside, crumpled and impossible to read in the dark, but he remembers well enough what it says. “Seems there was another election, but we don’t have a new president. Ulysses S. Grant has been elected president again, for all the good it will do out here.” 

Methodically, Tony folds the news print back up, holding it tight in one hand as he stares at the carved letters of Steve’s name. “You were the only authority that mattered out here, Sheriff. You deserved better than you got. I often wondered, if Barnes hadn’t died if you would have moved on again, gone to bigger and better places. President even. You would have changed this country I’m sure.” 

Picking up the empty glass, Tony salutes Steve’s grave marker, giving it a wry smile. “I would have voted for you, you know. I might have even followed you to the capital, if you’d asked me to.” 

There’s no might about it. Tony knows that from the moment he was smitten with Steve he would have followed him anywhere. The plan had even been to follow him to the grave, but somehow fate had intervened there, and so he was still here, living and breathing. It shouldn’t have been a surprise though, life had a way of being unfair to him, after all. 

Tony sits there in silence, his fingers steadily going numb, and his legs and back starting to ache, but he doesn’t want to leave just yet, so he lies back on the bare ground beside Steve’s empty grave and watches the stars overhead. 

“If they do bury me here, Steve, I won’t complain,” Tony admits to the air around him, tucking his nose into the collar Steve’s jacket to try and breathe in the last traces of his scent. “The view is certainly nice.” 

The stars twinkle above him, and in the distance the coyotes call out, and off key, Tony starts to hum the first strains of the song he’d used to sing to get Steve’s attention. 


End file.
